“I remember being invited for a coffee by a lecturer when I was a student. I recall feeling uneasy – I didn’t really want to go, but he was going to mark my essay.”
Photograph: portishead1/Getty Images

A few months into my first lecturing job I was told that a male colleague – let’s call him Matthew – was apparently keen on pursuing a female student now and then. He “dated” some young women he taught and was in “relationships” with a few (I use inverted commas here because I don’t consider such a liaison an equal one and therefore a real one in terms of power). It was apparently an open secret in the department and beyond.

For years, Matthew was allowed to grade these students’ coursework and supervise their undergraduate dissertations. He was their personal tutor, too. That means he was the primary reference writer once they graduated and started looking for jobs.

I felt uneasy. It didn’t seem right, even though these “relationships” were described as consensual. If #MeToo has taught us anything, it is this: consent is not a one-off, momentary act. It’s a process and should be given freely in a context devoid of power hierarchies.

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As a recent article in The Conversation argued: “If it is accepted that the imbalance of power between staff and students compromises the capacity of a student to provide free consent for sexual activity, and sexual activity without free consent is harassment or assault (as defined by law), then the current framing of staff-student ‘consensual’ relationships by Australian universities is inappropriate.”

I remember being invited for a coffee by a lecturer when I was a student. I recall feeling uneasy – I didn’t really want to go, but he was going to mark my essay. Nothing serious happened, but I had felt that refusing wasn’t an option.

If a student ended her “relationship” with Matthew, he would still be able to influence her career prospects. The student was vulnerable because there was no guarantee that a reference from her ex-lover would be an objective one if he was disgruntled. Would he be able to grade her coursework fairly, given that in a small department it is very easy to guess whose essay we are reading, even if it’s anonymised? What if the student had mental health issues?

Most UK universities take the middle road between prohibiting such relationships – as in the medical profession, where doctors are not allowed to have intimate relations with their patients – and the anything-goes option. Staff who enter into any kind of sexual relationship with a student must disclose this fact to human resources so that conflicts of interest are prevented – they are not allowed to teach, grade or supervise the student.

There are, however, some institutions where the guidelines are more vague, and my employer is one of them. Matthew did not keep these liaisons secret because he didn’t have to. It seemed that the university was OK with him putting photographs of himself and scantily clad female students on Facebook.

He was also Facebook friends with a lot of students and frequently socialised with them. This seemed to create expectations in students of a certain kind of camaraderie. They expected really good grades – and got them.

Those who did not – and that was most of us – could expect dismal module evaluations at the end of the semester. Even the external reviewer picked up on the unusually high grades (but not excellent coursework) in Matthew’s modules, but management let this go, presumably because Matthew came to be seen as representing a high-recruiting programme that brought in a lot of students.

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It all ended when students started bickering because they didn’t like the idea that, while they all got high grades, Matthew’s “girlfriend” got higher grades. They made a formal complaint to the university. He was later fired. He disappeared, as though in a cloud of smoke, nowhere to be found – even on the departmental website. Visiting lecturers were drafted in to cover for him, the rest of us added his administrative duties to our already overwhelming workload, and the department suffered.

A recent report on sexual misconduct by university staff reveals that more than four in 10 students have experienced “unwelcome advances and assault, including sexualised comments, inappropriate touching and rape”. The sector needs to rethink its approach to regulating staff-student intimate relationships.

This is not only about making procedures for reporting sexual harassment at universities straightforward and transparent, although that would be a good start. I would argue that we should go further and prohibit intimate relationships between staff and students, which cross professional boundaries, create discord in the workplace and leave students exposed to abuses of power.

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